Princeton council adopts new fee schedule for curbside organic waste pick-up program

Phyllis and Michael Suber show the small container they need to hold the household waste left over after they recycle in their Princeton home on Thursday, November 29, 2012. Martin Griff / The Times of Trenton

PRINCETON — The council tonight adopted a new fee schedule for the town’s curbside organic waste pickup program in an effort to keep it going through 2014 and encourage more residents to sign up for the composting initiative, the first of its kind in the state.

The curbside pickup includes waste such as pizza crusts, vegetable scraps and other organics for $65 a year. Princeton has a two-year contract with Premier Food Waste Recycling, a division of Central Jersey Waste and Recycling.

The prorated fee would adjust the amount homeowners pay if they opt in for the rest of 2013 and through 2014.

“I still wish we didn’t have to charge people to do this,” Councilwoman Heather Howard said. “Conceptually they (the enrolled households) are helping everyone.”

Town officials hope that by offering a prorated fee for the rest of the year, more homeowners will enter the program, which has 701 households signed up for it already.

“One of the comments we repeatedly get is that people don’t want to pay the $65 for six months or five months,” said Bob Hough, director of infrastructure and operations. “We have had a number of people who said they will sign up if their $65 goes for 12 months or more.”

Earlier this year, the town set a goal of having 1,000 people enrolled in the program, which town administrator Bob Bruschi said today was operating in the red.

Despite that though, he called the program a “loss leader” and said the town only subsidizes the program about $2,500 a month.

Town officials say the program’s success and any savings the town can yield from it is based on not just the enrollment numbers, but the participation levels of signed-up households.

Every ton of trash the town collects and transports to the landfill has a tipping fee of $125 attached to it. The organic program costs the town $15 per household a month and $46 a ton to transport the waste to the Wilmington Organics Recycing Center in Delaware. The out-of-state trip for the compost is a big part of the program’s expense, but town officials said they hope that as more communities catch on in the state, a composting center could be built closer to home.

In July, the town collected 445 tons of trash, paying about $55,625 in tipping fees. The organic waste program yielded about 32 tons of waste, saving the town about $4,000 in tipping fees.